January 24, 2018

Since The Repubs and the Dems kicked the can down the road on immigration, there's another government shutdown scheduled for less than three weeks. MItch McConnell is going to bring it to the floor. Big deal. It'll never pass because the Repubs don't want it to pass. So there will be another government shutdown while Chuck Schumer tries to deal with the Dealer-in-Chief who don't wanna maka da deal. If he done wanna maka da deal, Chuck Schumer will be running around in circles trying to make an irrational guy be rational.

Trump wants to send the Dreamers home so they can dream in their native lands. He loves the Dreamers and he will love them even more when they are safely home in Mexico on the other side of the Great Wall. After the next government shutdown the twitter sphere will be all lit up with twitters about how the Dems are making our poor military fighting men and women suffer by not paying them while forcing them into battle. Their wives and Mums will not even get their $100, 000. death bonus after they're shot down by the Taliban.

Will the Dems go to the mat for the Dreamers while the Repub propaganda machine grinds out the alternate facts about how the Dems are hurting our fighting men and women? And the Statue of Liberty will be closed. That great symbol of the free and the brave will only be able to be seen from afar. You will have to blow kisses at it instead of stepping right up and hugging it. Park rangers will be furloughed. It'll be terrible. All the while the Dems championing of the Dreamers will be pitted against the Repubs standing tall for our military.

When it's over, the Dreamers will be left twisting in the wind which has always been Trump's intention no matter how much he loves them. It has always been the Repubs' intention as well. Hidden up Mitch McConnell's sleeve is the so-called nuclear option by which is meant he will change the rules of the Senate to eliminate the filibuster for just this one vote. Of course, the Dems will not be able to do that when they have a majority. McConnell did it once to get Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court. He'll do it again with impunity guaranteeing a vote that opens the government without resolving the Dreamer crisis. After that the deportations of the Dreamers will begin.

Demonstrators descended on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, demanding that Republican lawmakers who voted for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act hear their concerns about the legislation. (Photo: @riseandresistny/Twitter)

Opponents of the Republican tax plan moving through Congress showed they were not backing down on Tuesday as hundreds of protesters chanted "Kill the bill!" and "Tax the rich, not the sick!" as they assembled outside the offices of GOP lawmakers.

While numerous arrests were made in the crowded hallways, the demonstrators made it clear that the fight to defeat the bill is not over yet.

Demonstrators targeted Reps. Ryan Costello (R-Penn.), Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), and other Republicans who voted for the tax plan, visiting their offices and telling staffers how they would be impacted by the law. Both Costello and Comstock are up for re-election in 2018.

Capitol Police began arresting protesters at about 2:30pm outside Costello's office, with chants of "Kill the bill, Costello!" continuing as people were led away in handcuffs.

The Senate passed its bill in the middle of the night on Saturday, after finalizing the proposal just five hours earlier. Democrats protested that no hearings had been held about the potential impact of the bill, which a number of bipartisan groups found would raise taxes on middle-class families by 2027. A Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday found that 53 percent of Americans disapprove of the legislation, while just 29 percent support it.

The Senate and House must still reconcile their two versions of the bill in a conference committee which was formed on Monday. Nine Republicans and five Democrats from the House have been named to the panel, with the Senate expected to send members later this week. The committee will debate the two bills with the goal of sending one piece of legislation to President Donald Trump's desk by Christmas.

With continued pressure in the coming days and weeks, said opponents of the #GOPTaxscam on social media, there is still a chance of keeping the bill from becoming law:

October 13, 2013

Now is the time to lance the boil of Republican extremism once and for all.

Since Barack Obama became president, the extremists who have taken over the Republican Party have escalated their demands every time he’s caved, using the entire government of the United States as their bargaining chit.

In 2010 he agreed to extend all of the Bush tax cuts through the end of 2012. Were they satisfied? Of course not.

In the summer of 2011, goaded by an influx of Tea Partiers, they demanded huge spending cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling. In response, the President offered an overly-generous $4 trillion “Grand Bargain,” including cuts in Social Security and Medicare and whopping cuts in domestic spending (bringing it to its lowest level as a share of gross domestic product in over half a century).

Were Republicans content? No. When they demanded more, Obama agreed to a Super Committee to find bigger cuts, and if the Super Committee failed, a “sequester” that would automatically and indiscriminately slice everything in the federal budget except Social Security and Medicare.

Not even Obama’s re-election put a damper on their increasing demands. By the end of 2012, they insisted that the Bush tax cuts be permanently extended or the nation would go over the “fiscal cliff.” Once again, Obama caved, agreeing to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts for incomes up to $400,000.

Early this year, after the sequester went into effect, Republicans demanded even bigger spending cuts. Obama offered more cuts in Medicare and a “chained CPI” to reduce Social Security payments, in exchange for Republican concessions on taxes.

Refusing the offer, and seemingly delirious with their power to hold the nation hostage, they demanded that the Affordable Care Act be repealed as a condition for funding the government and again raising the debt ceiling.

This time, though, Obama didn’t cave — at least, not yet.

The government is shuttered and the nation is on the verge of defaulting on its debts. But public opinion has turned sharply against the Republican Party. And the GOP’s corporate and Wall Street backers are threatening to de-fund it.

Suddenly the Republicans are acting like the school-yard bully who terrorized the playground but finally got punched in the face. They’re in shock. They’re humiliated. They’re trying to come up with ways of saving face.

With bloodied nose, House Republicans are running home. They’ve abruptly turned negotiations over to their Senate colleagues.

And just as suddenly, their demand to repeal or delay the Affordable Care Act has vanished. (An email from the group Tea Party Express says: “Are you like us wondering where the fight against Obamacare went?”) At a lunch meeting in the Capitol, Senator John McCain asked a roomful of Republican senators if they still believed it was possible to reverse parts of the program. According to someone briefed on the meeting, no one raised a hand — not even Ted Cruz.

It appears that negotiations over the federal budget deficit are about to begin once again, and presumably Senate Republicans will insist that Obama and the Democrats give way on taxes and spending in exchange for reopening the government and raising the debt ceiling for at least another year.

But keeping the government running and paying the nation’s bills should never have been bargaining chits in the first place, and the President and Democrats shouldn’t begin to negotiate over future budgets until they’re taken off the table.

The question is how thoroughly President Obama has learned that extortionist demands escalate if you give in to them.

August 15, 2013

CONGRESS began its summer recess last week and won’t reconvene until after Labor Day. You’d be forgiven for not noticing a difference. With just 15 bills signed into law so far this year, the 113th Congress is on pace to be the most unproductive since at least the 1940s.

But just because the legislature has ceased to function doesn’t mean our government has. Political decision making has moved to peripheral public entities, where power is exercised less transparently and accountability to voters is less direct. What we’re losing in the process isn’t government — it’s democracy.

Take the Federal Reserve. Absent any Congressional legislation to speak of — no short-term spending to increase job growth, no long-term plan to reduce the budget deficit — the nation’s central bank has been forced to do all the heavy lifting with the economy. The $85 billion of bonds it buys each month is now the main form of government stimulus to the economy as well as the linchpin of continued job growth. Congress’s inability to pass effective fiscal policy means that the Fed’s monetary policy, to keep long-term interest rates as low as possible, has become the only game in town for boosting private spending and investment.

But the strategy also poses serious risks: asset bubbles, if borrowers use the cheap money to speculate; bond collapses, if the Fed slows its bond buying too quickly and spooks the market; and inflation, if low interest rates cause buyers and sellers to expect prices to rise. It could also increase income inequality, by giving wealthy investors a cheap source of funds to expand their portfolios. Forcing the Fed to become the sole decision maker on the economy is also why the selection of a new Fed chairman has become so important — even more important than it ought to be.

Congress’s paralysis has also encouraged the Supreme Court to enter the political fray. Normally the judicial activism of recent years might be checked by Congressional action in response. But not now. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion for the majority in the 2010 “Citizens United” case, which struck down limits on corporate campaign contributions, rested partly on the presumption that Congress would require corporations to disclose their political expenditures. But no bill requiring full disclosure has stood a chance of making it through the quagmire.

The court’s decision this summer in “Shelby County v. Holder” handed Congress the task of coming up with a new, updated formula for deciding which states and localities need permission from the Justice Department, under the Voting Rights Act, to make changes to their election processes. But legislative paralysis makes the passage of any new formula highly unlikely. Seen in this light, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s deciding vote last year to uphold the Affordable Care Act probably reflected his reasonable fear that the court would otherwise be viewed, not unfairly, as just another political battleground.

Or consider climate change. It’s a public debate the nation briefly embarked on in the 2008 presidential race, when John McCain and Barack Obama presented different plans for cap-and-trade systems. Naturally, gridlock in Congress put an end to it. After the election, Mr. McCain backed off any cap-and-trade plan, and the two parties have been at loggerheads over the environment ever since.

The issue ultimately lost the spotlight to a debate over Mr. Obama’s choice for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Gina McCarthy, who is expected to use the E.P.A.’s authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the carbon emissions of power plants; and to a Congressional showdown, motivated in part by Mr. Obama’s E.P.A. appointment, over the use of the filibuster on presidential nominees.

Mr. Obama won the skirmish and got his administrator, but don’t expect much public deliberation over carbon emissions from here on. The E.P.A. will handle the issue through regulatory rule making, mostly unseen by Congress and the public.

A final displacement of national politics has been onto state governments, now grappling with everything from undocumented immigrants and gun control to gay marriage and abortion. While many political matters should be left to the states, these cry out for federal standards because of the relative ease with which undocumented immigrants, gun sellers, gay couples and women seeking abortions can transport themselves to more accommodating jurisdictions — depending, of course, on their pocketbooks.

What’s more, these institutions — the Fed, the Supreme Court, giant regulatory agencies like the EPA, and the states — aren’t even understood by the public to be making political decisions with national implications. Media coverage tends to be narrowly drawn for insiders — macroeconomists, constitutional scholars, E.P.A. watchers, the residents of a particular state — or trivialized for outsiders: Should the next Fed chief be female? Are Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas too openly partisan? Is Ms. McCarthy too much of a firebrand? Are “red” states diverging from “blue” states?

The Republican right — mostly new House members who are supported by the Tea Party and who are in open rebellion against the rest of the right — are probably pleased with the gridlock in Congress. They would like nothing better than to stop the federal government from functioning. But they may not fully grasp that their efforts have only shifted power elsewhere in the system.

Some of the institutions gaining power may be making decisions consistent with conservative values: the Supreme Court and some state governments, for instance. But hardly all (the Fed and the E.P.A.).

In any event, it’s bizarre that a self-styled populist insurrection would end up making our government less accountable to the people. But that’s exactly what it’s done. What’s really gridlocked now is democracy.

June 09, 2013

Conservative Republicans in our nation’s capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They’ve basically shut Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No budget. No grand bargain on the deficit. No background checks on guns. Nothing on climate change. No tax reform. No hike in the minimum wage. Nothing so far on immigration reform.

It’s as if an entire branch of the federal government — the branch that’s supposed to deal directly with the nation’s problems, not just execute the law or interpret the law but make the law — has gone out of business, leaving behind only a so-called “sequester” that’s cutting deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure, programs for the nation’s poor, and national defense.

The window of opportunity for the President to get anything done is closing rapidly. Even in less partisan times, new initiatives rarely occur after the first year of a second term, when a president inexorably slides toward lame duck status.

But the nation’s work doesn’t stop even if Washington does. By default, more and more of it is shifting to the states, which are far less gridlocked than Washington. Last November’s elections resulted in one-party control of both the legislatures and governor’s offices in all but 13 states — the most single-party dominance in decades.

This means many blue states are moving further left, while red states are heading rightward. In effect, America is splitting apart without going through all the trouble of a civil war.

Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, for example, now controls both legislative chambers and the governor’s office for the first time in more than two decades. The legislative session that ended a few weeks ago resulted in a hike in the top income tax rate to 9.85%, an increased cigarette tax, and the elimination of several corporate tax loopholes. The added revenues will be used to expand early-childhood education, freeze tuitions at state universities, fund jobs and economic development, and reduce the state budget deficit. Along the way, Minnesota also legalized same-sex marriage and expanded the power of trade unions to organize.

California and Maryland passed similar tax hikes on top earners last year. The governor of Colorado has just signed legislation boosting taxes by $925 million for early-childhood education and K-12 (the tax hike will go into effect only if residents agree, in a vote is likely in November).

On the other hand, the biggest controversy in Kansas is between Governor Sam Brownback, who wants to shift taxes away from the wealthy and onto the middle class and poor by repealing the state’s income tax and substituting an increase in the sales tax, and Kansas legislators who want to cut the sales tax as well, thereby reducing the state’s already paltry spending for basic services. Kansas recently cut its budget for higher education by almost 5 percent.

Other rightward-moving states are heading in the same direction. North Carolina millionaires are on the verge of saving $12,500 a year, on average, from a pending income-tax cut even as sales taxes are raised on the electricity and services that lower-income depend residents depend on. Missouri’s transportation budget is half what it was five years ago, but lawmakers refuse to raise taxes to pay for improvements.

The states are splitting as dramatically on social issues. Gay marriages are now recognized in twelve states and the District of Columbia. Colorado and Washington state permit the sale of marijuana, even for non-medical uses. California is expanding a pilot program to allow nurse practitioners to perform abortions.

Meanwhile, other states are enacting laws restricting access to abortions so tightly as to arguably violate the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In Alabama, the mandated waiting period for an abortion is longer than it is for buying a gun.

Speaking of which, gun laws are moving in opposite directions as well. Connecticut, California, and New York are making it harder to buy guns. Yet if you want to use a gun to kill someone who’s, say, spray-painting a highway underpass at night, you might want to go to Texas, where it’s legal to shoot someone who’s committing a “public nuisance” under the cover of dark. Or you might want to live in Kansas, which recently enacted a law allowing anyone to carry a concealed firearm onto a college campus.

The states are diverging sharply on almost every issue you can imagine. If you’re an undocumented young person, you’re eligible for in-state tuition at public universities in fourteen states (including Texas). But you might want to avoid driving in Arizona, where state police are allowed to investigate the immigration status of anyone they suspect is here illegally. And if you’re poor and lack health insurance you might want to avoid a state like Wisconsin that’s refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government will be picking up almost the entire tab.

Federalism is as old as the Republic, but not since the real Civil War have we witnessed such a clear divide between the states on central issues affecting Americans.

Some might say this is a good thing. It allows more of us to live under governments and laws we approve of. And it permits experimentation: Better to learn that a policy doesn’t work at the state level, where it’s affected only a fraction of the population, than after it’s harmed the entire nation. As the jurist Louis Brandies once said, our states are “laboratories of democracy.”

But the trend raises three troubling issues.

First, it leads to a race to bottom. Over time, middle-class citizens of states with more generous safety nets and higher taxes on the wealthy will become disproportionately burdened as the wealthy move out and the poor move in, forcing such states to reverse course. If the idea of “one nation” means anything, it stands for us widely sharing the burdens and responsibilities of citizenship.

Second, it doesn’t take account of spillovers — positive as well as negative. Semi-automatic pistols purchased without background checks in one state can easily find their way easily to another state where gun purchases are restricted. By the same token, a young person who receives an excellent public education courtesy of the citizens of one states is likely to move to another state where job opportunity are better. We are interdependent. No single state can easily contain or limit the benefits or problems it creates for other states.

Finally, it can reduce the power of minorities. For more than a century “states rights” has been a euphemism for the efforts of some whites to repress or deny the votes of black Americans. Now that minorities are gaining substantial political strength nationally, devolution of government to the states could play into the hands of modern-day white supremacists.

A great nation requires a great, or at least functional, national government. The Tea Partiers and other government-haters who have caused Washington to all but close because they refuse to compromise are threatening all that we aspire to be together.

April 26, 2013

Economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good. Most had forecast growth of at least 3 percent (on an annualized basis) in the first quarter. But we learned this morning (in the Commerce Department’s report) it grew only 2.5 percent.

That’s better than the 2 percent growth last year and the slowdown at the end of the year. But it’s still cause for serious concern.

First, consumers won’t keep up the spending.Their savings rate fell sharply — from 4.7% in the last quarter of 2012 to 2.6% from January through March.

Add in March’s dismal employment report, the lowest percentage of working-age adults in jobs since 1979, and January’s hike in payroll taxes, and consumer spending will almost certainly drop.

Second, the recovery continues to be wildly lopsided. The only thing really keeping it going is the rip-roaring stock market. But the stock market only boosts the wealth of the richest 10 percent of Americans, who own 90 percent of stocks (including 401-K retirement accounts).

But no economy can maintain momentum just on the spending of the richest 10 percent.

Third, American exports can’t possibly pick up the slack. In fact, they’re dropping. Europe is falling into recession because of austerity economics. Japan is still a basket case. China’s economy is slowing. Much of the developing world’s economy is dependent on exports to the developed world – so don’t hold your breath for developing countries to bail us out.

So what is Washington doing? Worse than nothing. It has now adopted the same kind of austerity economics that’s doomed Europe — cutting federal spending and reducing total demand. And the sequester doesn’t end September 30. It takes an even bigger bite out of the federal budget next fiscal year.

Earth to Washington: The economy is slowing. The recovery is stalling. At the very least, repeal the sequester.

January 24, 2013

The most important thing to Republicans is deficit reduction. It's the chief thing they talk about. It's their main concern, it's their singular issue. Right? Right.... Then why did they vote to add $77 billion in pork to the so-called 'fiscal cliff' bill? But don't get me wrong - Democrats not only voted for it but were instrumental in adding it to the bill as well. But why were the American people kept in the dark and not told that this bill like a lot of others was all about the pork. It's not that this bill was not discussed at great length by the punditry. Bloviators were bloviating non-stop for months. Pontificators were pontificating full time. Purveyors of bovine excrement were shoveling constantly. But no one saw it coming. Not Dick Gregory of Meet the Press, not Bob Schieffer of Face the Nation, not Ed Schultz or Rachel Maddow of msnbc. It's not like pork is a recent phenomena. But it takes sheer gall to add $77 billion in tax break loopholes for the rich to a deficit reduction bill!

The Washington crowd would have us believe that this whole Shakespearian drama came down to the wire, and that, if we went over the cliff, the middle class would be ruined, we'd go back into a recession and the whole global economy would go down the tubes. Each of the central cast of actors took their turn at center stage: John Boehner, Harry Reid, Eric Cantor and a whole host of lesser lights. But none of them mentioned the impending pork that would be added to whatever bill they came up with. But what they came up with at the last minute was a 157 page bill, most of which, while raising tax rates for the richest Americans, was devoted to tax breaks for the rich. Now the punditry and the politicians would have us believe that this was a last minute deal. No it wasn't. How do you write a 157 page bill at the last minute? Most of it was a preconceived pork bill lying in wait to be added on to whatever last minute deal they came up with to prevent us from going over the fiscal cliff.

Wendy Caputo of Riverside was outraged. She wrote a letter to the editor of the East Bay RI which said the following:

"Dozens of tax breaks for business and industry including about $70 million for a cost-recovery program for “motorsports entertainment complexes”; i.e. racetracks! Tax breaks for Hollywood producers who shoot movies and TV shows in the US at a cost of about $430 million over the next 2 years. Legislation allowing US corporations to defer taxes on some income earned from their overseas subsidiaries costing the US Treasury $10.8 billion over this year and next. An agreement to subsidize the domestic production of rum by sending federal tax revenue collected from rum production in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands back to them. A $15 million dollar-a-year tax break to the asparagus industry to compensate for a cheaper product from South America. A tax break for people who buy electric scooters, Segways, and such! And, the list goes on . . ."

It takes a lot of unmitigated gall to add all this pork to a bill that was supposedly all about deficit reduction in the first place. You remember the whole purpose of the fiscal cliff was to force deficit reduction, don't you? The pork was at the heart of the bill and consumed the most paperwork, but no politician ever spoke about it. Oh yeah, it did things like "raise tax rates on the rich while keeping middle class tax rates the same," "keep extended unemployment insurance the same", and "index the alternative minimum tax to inflation." All this stuff could have been written on two pages. That leaves 155 pages of the bill for pork. Such is the nature of compromise in Washington, DC. What this all boils down to is that, while Republicans go apoplectic over the deficit, what they really care about is tax loopholes for the class they represent - the very rich. And Democrats are totally misguided if they think that the pork that they added represents an economic stimulus. The whole American Taxpayer Relief Act was a sham. It gave taxpayers relief on the one hand while giving them a migraine on the other!

A feature of the "tax relief" bill was a $100. million tax giveaway to NASCAR race track owners (you know, Mitt Romney's friends) and other "motorsport entertainment complexes" in the form of "accelerated depreciation." Now most Americans don't have a clue about how accelerated depreciation for businesses raises tax bills for the middle class, but here's how it works. Say you, like NASCAR, build a racetrack. Then you charge people to come and see automobiles race. You make money. Therefore, you have to pay taxes. But wait a minute. First you get to take a tax break because your asset, the race track, has lost value or depreciated, and it depreciates more with each passing year. So you subtract the amount of that depreciation from your tax bill. Now accelerated depreciation lets you subtract this depreciation at a faster rate. Even though your race track has only depreciated a little bit the first year after you built it, you get to deduct a whopping amount from your tax bill. You might not even have to pay any taxes at all.

The rationale for accelerated depreciation is guess what? It creates jobs. Only problem is that that is not true. David Cay Johnston in The Fine Print says:

"...future Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow showed that accelerated depreciation deductions do not increase economic growth. Other studies by leading tax economists, including Dale Jorgenson of Harvard University and Robert Hall of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University ... came to the same conclusion. Most compelling of all, the coauthor of the study that was behind the 1954 accelerated depreciation law, Evsey Domar, acknowledged in 1957 that Solow was right and he was wrong - accelerated depreciation does not produce faster economic growth."

Johnston goes on to say, and I paraphrase, that even that antibusiness socialist, Barack Obama, sponsored 100% immediate writeoffs of all new investment during most of his first term which should have made him a darling of the pro-capitalist business crowd. Meanwhile, as you, the American people, have your taxes taken immediately right out of your paycheck, the big business crowd gets to defer them. This means that you, the 99%, have to pay more taxes to maintain the same level of public services. Of course, the right wingers think you should go without them at all thus keeping the cost of government down while all the while they add tax breaks for themselves to deficit reduction bills.

But to be fair the pork was sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats according to an article in the New York Times.

"The tax break in the new federal law closely resembles the language of racetrack tax bills introduced by Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, home to the auto industry and the Michigan International Speedway; Representative Vern Buchanan, Republican of Florida, home of the Daytona International Speedway; and Dean Heller, a Republican senator and former representative from Nevada, home of the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

"Among the co-sponsors, or chief backers, were Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, home of the Kansas Speedway, and the senators from North Carolina, home base for many race teams and the Nascar industry — Richard M. Burr, a Republican, and Kay Hagan, a Democrat.

"Also supporting the legislation was Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, whose love for the sport earned him the nickname Mr. Nascar. Mr. Kyl, who just retired from Congress, used to volunteer at the Phoenix International Raceway.

"Ms. Stabenow’s Web site includes pictures of her at a Nascar race at the Michigan track in August."

In addition to NASCAR, the pork in the American Tax Relief Bill is helping to fund Goldman Sachs' new headquarters in lower Manhattan and subsidize the very profitable Disney corporation. Nascar, Wall Street and Hollywood came out the big winners. But nobody in the media even mentioned it. Like it was not important. Like we should just accept it without comment. Hey, it's just the cost of doing business. It's "normal." Deficit reduction be damned. Hey, vaunted punditry, why don't you wake up and publicize the pork in each bill before it goes down or is it top secret?

May 02, 2012

If you were to stroll by the House chamber today — or tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that — you would arrive at the ideal time to see what the lawmakers do best: absolutely nothing.

It’s another recess week for our lazy leaders. Oh, sorry: “Constituent Work Week” is what they’re calling it these days, as if lawmakers were filling potholes and making calls to Social Security rather than raising campaign cash.

By the time the Republican-led House returns next week, members will have been working in Washington on just 41 of the first 127 days of 2012 — and that was the busy part of the year. They are planning to be on vacation — er, doing “constituent work” — 17 of the year’s remaining 34 weeks, and even when they are in town the typical workweek is three days.

Good work if you can get it — but the behavior is doing quite a job on the rest of us. On those infrequent occasions the House is in session, the Senate, also enamored of recess, often isn’t, which helps explain why the two chambers can’t agree on much of anything.

To call this 112th Congress a do-nothing Congress would be an insult — to the real Do-Nothing Congress of 1947-48. That Congress passed 908 laws. To date, this one has passed 106 public laws. Even if they triple that output in the rest of 2012 — not a terribly likely proposition — they will still be in last place going back at least 40 years.

Doing nothing would arguably be preferable to what the House is actually doing. Lawmakers have staged 195 roll-call votes so far this year, which sounds like a lot until you realize that boils down to only about 60 pieces of legislation, including post-office namings. Among the 60:

●The Mark Twain Commemorative Coin Act.

●The Sportsmen’s Heritage Act of 2012.

●Legislation requiring the Treasury to mint coins commemorating the 225th anniversary of the U.S. Marshals Service.

The few pieces of important legislation of this Congress, such as the payroll-tax break and the debt-limit increase, have been passed by the Republican majority under pressure and duress. Republican leaders claim that a heavy schedule means bigger government, but the lax schedule has been challenged by no less a conservative than firebrand freshman Allen West.

This is not to suggest that the Democratic-controlled Senate is blameless. The Post’s Paul Kane went through Senate roll-call votes from this year and found that, of the 87 votes, the majority were on just three bills: 25 on the highway bill, 16 on the postal bill and 13 on an insider-trading bill. Sixteen others were on confirmations.

But there is a crucial difference: While a simple majority in the House can pass pretty much anything without agreement of the minority, the Senate is traditionally where bills go to die. Because the Democrats lack a filibuster-proof majority, they can bring virtually nothing to a vote without the blessing of the Republicans. Even with that high hurdle, the Senate has been able to slog through a number of bills in recent weeks: a long-term renewal of the surface transportation bill, renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, postal reform and a bill making it easier for companies to go public.

The last of those passed the House, too, but the other three are awaiting action. Of those, the failure to pass a long-term highway bill is particularly glaring. House Speaker John Boehner announced in November that he was proceeding with the bill, but so far he has been able to pass only a short-term extension. The House also has yet to act on the China currency bill the Senate passed last fall. Instead, House Republicans have voted repeatedly on budgets that will never be followed and similarly doomed attempts at repealing Obama priorities.

With such a lean agenda, filling even 41 days has been a challenge. House Republicans are now devoting full floor debates to bills such as H.R. 2087, “To remove restrictions from a parcel of land situated in the Atlantic District, Accomack County, Virginia.” That issue — allowing development on a 32-acre property — was so crucial to the Republic that lawmakers had five roll-call votes on the topic.

They dressed it up and called it a “jobs bill” — but really it was another bill showing that House Republicans aren’t doing theirs.

February 01, 2012

When the Romney campaign disclosed in December that the couple’s five sons had a $100 million trust fund, I suspected that, in setting up the fund, the Romneys used a tax strategy that allows some very rich people to avoid paying gift taxes. But it was impossible to know if this was the case without seeing their tax returns going back years.

So when Mitt Romney released the family’s 2010 tax return last week, I went looking. I found a hint on pages 132 and 134 of the return. It showed that the value of property placed that year into another family trust, the Ann D. Romney Blind Trust, was, for tax purposes, zero. The Ann Romney trust is not the same trust as the one that holds the Romney sons’ $100 million, but I wondered if the Romneys used the same approach in prior years when it came to valuing property placed into the sons’ trust.

Reuters emailed the Romney campaign spokeswoman to ask how much the Romneys paid in gift taxes on assets put into the sons’ trust over the last 17 years. The spokeswoman, citing Brad Malt, the Romney family tax lawyer, answered: none.

The idea that someone could pay zero gift taxes on contributions to a $100 million trust fund may surprise people who have heard arguments that the wealthy are overburdened by gift and estate taxes. But the Romneys’ gift-tax avoidance strategy is perfectly legal.

Under tax rules, wealthy people must pay a gift tax of 35 percent on gifts above a lifetime limit known as the “unified estate tax credit.” That limit was $1.2 million for a married couple in 1995 when the sons’ trust was created and $2 million in 2009, but is now $10 million.

So, if the limit is, at most, $10 million, how did the Romneys create this $100 million fund without paying gift taxes?

The explanation may stem from how the Romneys were able to value the assets put into the trust. If I’m right, it involves a special tax deal that Congress gives to people who manage investment partnerships, as Romney did at Bain Capital from 1984 to 1999.

This deal allows these managers to receive a kind of compensation known as “carried interest.” As the tax law sees it, carried interest does not represent ownership of stock or other securities, only the right to receive future profits. Because there is no ownership, the IRS lets people value their carried interest at zero for gift tax purposes if they meet certain technical rules. We asked the Romney campaign if carried interest was involved several times in emails. The campaign declined to comment about this and other specifics.

VALUING A GIFT AT ZERO

To understand how this works conceptually, imagine your employer gave you a bonus in company stock.

You would owe income taxes immediately on the stock as compensation, and it would be taxed at the same rate as a cash bonus. And if you gave the stock to your children, you would owe, on stock above $10 million, a gift tax of 35 percent of the market price on the day you gave it away.

Now imagine that instead of giving you stock outright, your employer gave you only the right to future increases in the value of company shares – which, like carried interest, is just a right to some potential future income. You could give that right to your children and legally tell the IRS that its value was zero provided they hold onto it for several years.

This would be legally true, even if the company’s stock had been steadily rising for years and was virtually a sure bet to continue going up in value. Of course as a matter of economics it would be a very valuable gift to your children.

The scenario of transferring a right to something of value in the future and valuing it at nothing shows up on the Romneys’ 2010 tax return, which reveals two contributions to the Ann D. Romney Blind Trust. Both contributions were valued at zero.

NO COMMENT

The Romney campaign declined to confirm that this is what happened with the sons’ trust. Malt, the family tax lawyer, and spokeswoman Andrea Saul have declined to go further than Malt’s statement that the contributions fell below the unified credit.

The campaign, which set up an email address for journalists with questions about the tax returns, did not offer any comment nor did it respond to specific questions, including whether any of the personal or trust returns had been audited, whether any adjustments had resulted and whether the gifts to the sons had been completed more than three years ago, which would put them beyond any review by the IRS.

There are other perfectly legal techniques that would also allow many millions of dollars to be passed on while avoiding gift taxes.

The Romneys could attain the same result by putting into the trust any asset whose value was expected to rapidly increase. They could also use a trust that creates an annuity for themselves for a few years provided the trust assets grew much faster than the minimum interest rate payout set by the IRS each month. In each of these cases the parents would pay any income taxes and that is just what the Romneys’ 2010 and preliminary 2011 tax returns show. They report the trust income as their own and pay the taxes on the income the trust earned from its rapidly appreciating assets — but no gift taxes.

How much income will flow from these gifts is known only to the Romney family and to Malt, who works at the Ropes & Gray law firm in Boston.

Mitt and Ann Romney appear to have complied with the law. What’s at fault is the law. Congress treats ordinary taxpayers one way and managers of private equity and hedge funds like Mitt Romney another. It’s also a fiction that there is a lifetime limit on tax-free gifts of $10 million when Congress lets unlimited sums pass untaxed this way.

Will this change? It’s hard to say, given the gridlock in Washington. But President Barack Obama’s State of the Union message could signal a new direction. In a speech that mentioned taxes 34 times, he proposed sweeping changes in the tax code, a message that could resonate in the 2012 campaign and in Congress in 2013. Watch this space.

January 19, 2012

Occupy Congress/DC protesters hold a banner in front of the U.S. Capitol during a rally in Washington, January 17, 2012. Reuters.

It has begun – “Occupy Congress” is in its first day – the first day in a week of demonstrations, lobbying and occupying Washington DC. It will be the largest ever gathering of Occupy Wall Street activists from around the country – including over a dozen from right here in San Diego. Tuesday, January 17th, is the day that Congress reconvenes. And the occupiers are ready to give them an earful.

Occupy Protesters Swarm US Capitol in Washington

Protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement are meeting outside the Capitol for what participants hope will become the largest gathering of Occupy activists from around the country.

A few hundred protesters gathered outside barricades around the Capitol on a cold, rainy Tuesday morning. U.S. Capitol Police say one person has been arrested and charged with assault on a police officer.

Participants say they are decrying the influence of corporate money in politics and want to show the House of Representatives what real democracy looks like. The House reconvenes Tuesday after its winter recess.

The protest comes as the nation’s capital has emerged as one of the strongest bastions of the Occupy movement, in part because the National Park Service has allowed protesters to maintain their encampments.

_____

Hundreds of Occupy protesters rally at US Capitol

Several hundred demonstrators with the Occupy movement rallied outside the U.S. Capitol building on Tuesday to denounce what they called the influence of money in Congress.

“It’s important to let people know we’re not going to take it anymore. People are really mad about the way things are going and we want Congress to understand that,” said protester James Cullen, 30, an unemployed social worker from Greenbelt, Maryland.

The demonstrators were part of a movement that started with the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York last year and spread to some other U.S. cities.

The protesters gathered on a lawn outside the Capitol to greet members of Congress returning from a holiday break with a day of rallies and protests they said would include attempts to occupy lawmakers’ offices.

They carried signs saying, “Face it liberals, the Dems sold us out,” “Congress for sale” and “Banksters of America.”

The morning demonstration was generally peaceful. Police said one protester was arrested for allegedly assaulting a police officer.

“Corporations and government have been so inextricably linked that it’s not a true democracy anymore, and people have to realize that,” said David, 16, a high school student from New Haven, Connecticut, who gave only his first name.

‘Occupy Congress’ protesters arrested

One man was arrested for assault on a police officer Tuesday during day-long ‘Occupy Congress” protests on Capitol Hill.

Capitol Police Sgt. Kimberly Schneider confirmed the arrest, but did not have a name for the man, who was being processed at Capitol Police headquarters.

Demonstrators affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street are camped out at the West Front Lawn of the Capitol for what they call a “day of action against a corrupt political institution.” The group also plans to march later to the Supreme Court and the White House.

“It’s important to note what they have said, and that is: the status quo is not acceptable,” Pelosi said. “If I were they, I would have wedded this directly to the role of money in politics.”

UPDATE: Schneider said Tuesday afternoon that four people had been arrested in connection with the protests. William Griffin was charged with assaulting a police officer, she said, while Nathaniel Schrier, Clinton Boyd and and Heron Boyce were charged with other charges.

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalized police force, and forbids federal or militarized involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that right-wing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilization against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorize mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarized reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organized Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

In September 2008, Bachus and other congressional leaders were privately briefed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on the economy’s imminent meltdown.

The next day, Bachus was buying option funds that would increase in value if the economy tanked. It did. While your 401(k) and all thoughts of retirement melted into a never-ending job at Wal-Mart, the House chairman made a tidy profit on his country’s misfortunes.

And he didn’t do anything illegal.

Financial investments by House Speaker John Boehner and former speaker Nancy Pelosi also earned mentions. And yet, there is the temptation is to write such incidents off as exceptions that prove the rule of good behavior.

But in fact, the insider trading problem in Congress is systemic and longstanding. Though it received no mention, the foundation of the “60 Minutes” report was 16 years of analysis by an academic quartet led by Alan Ziobrowski, a professor of real estate finance at Georgia State University.

His wife, Augusta State University professor Brigitte Ziobrowski, James Boyd of Lindenwood University and Ping Cheng of Florida Atlantic University served as fellow researchers – as did an army of grad students.

“For years, we went through financial disclosure forms and we digitized their stock transactions. And then we ran a series of tests to see how [members of Congress] compared to the market,” Alan Ziobrowski said this week.

“The bottom line was that they considerably beat the market. In academic finance, we consider that to be prima facie evidence of insider trading,” he said. “They were even better than corporate insiders at it.” Senators were the best and even outperformed hedge fund managers.

Technically, Ziobrowski said, what members of Congress (and their staffers, one presumes) are engaged in isn’t insider trading. That’s a term reserved for executives within a particular corporation.

“What we claim they have is an informational advantage,” he said. “These guys have information that’s outside the corporation. Probably, companies would love to know what they know.”

Little things like regulations that can be added or subtracted, defense spending that might be cut or increased. That sort of thing.

The Ziobrowski crew has eschewed anything that might smack of partisanship – which explains its absence from the “60 Minutes” report.

Partisan differences in investment returns were minimal. Senators beat the market by 12 percent per year, House members by 6 percent – a difference that could be explained by the fact that the Senate is a smaller club, where access to fruitful information is more concentrated.

In the House, younger members made greater gains in the market than senior members. Possibly because younger members are less financially secure and more likely to take financial risks.

A large part of me wants to believe that members of Congress are simply brighter than the rest of us, perhaps more aware of societal and financial trends. It is a sliver of hope that Ziobrowski politely demolishes.

“From my perspective, it’s fairly simple. If I’m sitting on a pile of $50,000 worth of stock of XYZ Company, and I find out that something’s coming down the pike that’s not going to be good for XYZ, how could you resist the temptation to unload it?” he asked.

Democrats and Republicans have introduced legislation this week to prohibit members of Congress and their staffs from using nonpublic information for investing or personal gain. Investment transactions would have to be reported within 90 days.

Ziobrowski said the legislation would be better than nothing. “The problem is the system is rigged. The whole notion that, somehow, financial disclosure solves all the ethical issues is really quite a joke. Financial disclosures are not audited. There’s nobody to check them to see if they’re accurate. Even if they are accurate, the public doesn’t see them for a year, year-and-a-half after the transactions have been made,” he said.

Corporate insiders are required to report their stock transactions immediately. Ziobrowski would like to see Congress adopt that rule. Though there’s no chance that it will.

But the House-Senate “super committee” in charge of formulating a deficit reduction deal has a deadline coming up next week. The impact on your economic fortune and mine may hang in the balance.

It sure would be nice to know if any members of Congress are saying the right things in public – and betting against us in private.

WASHINGTON — Lobbyists for a day, a band of millionaires stormed Capitol Hill on Wednesday to urge Congress to tax them more.

They had a little trouble getting in. It turns out there are procedures, even for the really rich.

But once inside, their message was embraced by liberals and tolerated by some conservatives — including the ideological leader of anti-tax lawmakers, who had some advice for them, too.

"If you think the federal government can spend your money better than you can, then by all means" pay more in taxes than you owe, said Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform, a group that has gotten almost all congressional Republicans to pledge to vote against tax hikes. The IRS should have a little line on the form where people can donate money to the government, he suggested, "just like the tip line on a restaurant receipt."

One of the millionaires suggested that if Norquist wanted low taxes and less government, "Renounce your American citizenship and move to Somalia where they don't collect any tax."

In the silence left by the private efforts of the "supercommittee" to find $1.2 trillion or more in deficit cuts by Thanksgiving, free advice flowed in public.

And not just any advice: pie-in-the-sky suggestions from those not connected to the talks, mostly to reopen debates that have led nowhere. The millionaires want the panel to raise taxes on people who earn more than $1 million, even though most Republicans are committed against the idea. And 150 House member and senators urged a much bigger debt-and-deficit deal, even as a small-scope agreement is proving elusive.

While they were at it, the lawmakers insisted that bipartisanship was not, in fact, dead.

This group of House members and senators shared a stage and some jokes and signed a letter urging the supercommittee of Republicans and Democrats to find the required $1.2 trillion in cuts — plus about $2.8 trillion more. They all want the panel to avoid triggering automatic cuts as a penalty for failing.

So this uneasy alliance of 150 Republicans and Democrats will vote for whatever deal the supercommittee strikes?

"No," said House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer. "Nobody's going to commit to the deal until they see the deal."

What deal? There is no evidence that one is near, so the millionaires tried to meet with anyone who would meet with them.

The progressive caucus did, eagerly and on-camera. The rest wasn't so easy.

At a basement entrance to the Capitol, a police officer pointed to the name badges that identified each wearer as "Patriotic Millionaire."

"That is not a visitor's badge," the officer said. "Go to the visitors desk and get a visitor's badge."

Off they trudged, a group mostly of men in business-casual clothing toting laptops and umbrellas, to a desk visited by tourists and lobbyists. Badges secured, they headed in.

"I'm with the Patriotic Millionaires and we want to pay more in taxes," he told her.

Noem grinned.

"How much more?" she asked.

Then it was off to meet, not with senators but their staffs — and not in the Capitol but in offices across the street.

Progress was not made, by all accounts.

A meeting with an aide to Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., opened with his aide announcing that the senator believes the wealthy pay more taxes than their fair share, according to one of the millionaires, Matthew Palevsky, a consultant and founder of the Council on Crime Prevention.

"We defined it as not paying our fair share," Palevsky said of the 20-minute chat. "It was clear we were coming from different points of view."

In a meeting with Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, the congressman faux-proposed — apparently — to an aide to the millionaires. She declined.

Then it was off, on a bus not a limo, across town to see Norquist.

Why were they bothering with him?

"That's what I asked this morning," said one of the millionaires, Frank Jernigan, a former senior software engineer for Google.

"It's a media hook," offered another, Guy Saperstein, a retired lawyer and former president of the Sierra Club Foundation.

Such candor is not the norm in these parts.

For his part, Norquist said he was ready for the group with a tongue-in-cheek Torah lesson: Maimonides and his "eight degrees of charity." That's what Norquist says the millionaires are essentially proposing with their tax-me-more pitch. Perhaps there should be a ninth, Norquist suggested.

"Nobody's holding them back" from donating money to the federal government, he said as he prepared for the group's arrival. "They're saying, 'Gee, I'd sure like to write a big check to the federal government, if someone would just stop stopping me.'"

Lockheed Martin has one client: the US government. They make no products which are sold to the general public. But they employ an army of lobbyists who have Congress men and women in their pocket. They insist on funding Lockheed Martin products like the F-22 Raptor fighter plane even though it has proven to be a piece of shit that the Pentagon doesn't even want. They lobby for war and the weapons of war at every turn because it is profitable for Lockheed Martin and Wall Street demands higher and higher profits. And like Northrup-Grumman, their partner in crime, they run TV ads to lobby and convince the general public that they are the good guys looking out for our interests. Northrup-Grumman sells no products to the general public. Yet they besiege us with their TV ads. To what end? Here's why. They want the TV networks to be dependent on a huge hunk of cash from them. This makes it less likely that any of the news magazines like Meet the Press or 60 Minutes will ever do a critical study of their industry with the extra added benefit of creating a warm, fuzzy feeling in the general public for their industry which is war. There is the same rationale for the oil, coal and gas industries. Their TV ads essentially amount to lobbying the TV industry and the general public. This is in addition to the amounts of money they spend lobbying Congress.

It is a striking ad. An intimidating combat aircraft soars in the background, with the slogan up front in all capital letters: 300 MILLION PROTECTED, 95,000 EMPLOYED. The ad—for Lockheed Martin's F-22 Raptor fighter plane—was part of the company's last-gap effort to save one of its most profitable weapons from being "terminated," as they say in standard budget parlance. The pro—F-22 ad ran scores of times, in print, on political websites, and even in Washington's Metro. One writer at the Washington Post joked that at a time when many companies had been cutting back on their advertising budgets, Lockheed Martin's barrage of full-page ads in February and March 2009 was the main thing keeping the paper afloat.

When an arms company starts bragging about how many jobs its pet project creates, hold on to your wallet. It often means that the company wants billions of dollars' worth of your tax money for a weapon that costs too much, does too little, and may not have been needed in the first place. So it is with the Raptor, which at $350 million per plane is the most expensive combat aircraft ever built. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has suggested that the F-22 needs to be cut because even with wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has never been used in combat. In fact, in its first "mission"—flying to Japan for deployment at a US air base there—the plane had technical difficulties and had to land in Hawaii, far short of its final destination.

So the plane is a piece of shit, but it creates jobs, jobs, jobs. And jobs are what the country needs, right? And more profits for Lockheed Martin and higher salaries for Lockheed Martin's CEO. Not to mention the lobbying industry. Those poor suckers need jobs too—desperately.

Hartung continues:

But Lockheed Martin insists that the Raptor's unique capabilities more thsn justify its huge price tag. For example, did you know that it is the "first and only 24/7/365 All-Weather Stealth Fighter"? That it has a radar signature "approximately the size of a bumblebee"? Or that it provides "first-look, first-shot, first-kill air dominance capability"? Lockheed Martin has a lot to say, and it is serious about selling you its most profitable plane. How else to explain the statement from the F-22 Raptor web page that, "when we meet the enemy, we want to win 100—0, not 51—49"? It is hard to take this claim seriously. The Raptor has never seen combat—and it may never do so given that it was designed to counter a Soviet plane that was never built—so at best the score is 0—0. But the statement has a grain of truth—it describes Lockheed Martin's lobbying efforts a whole lot more accurately than its fighter plane's mission success rate.

The company never reached its goal of 100—0 support in the Senate, but not for lack of trying. As soon as there was even a whimper of a possibility that the F-22 program would be stopped at "only" 187 planes—about what the Pentagon wanted, but only half of what the Air Force and Lockheed Martin were striving for—the company started racking up big numbers on its side. By early 2009, months in advance of President Obama's first detailed budget submission to Congress—which would decide the fate of the F-22—Lockheed Martin and its partners in the F-22 project (Pratt & Whitney and Boeing) had lined up forty-four Senators and two hundred members of the House of Representatives to sign on to a "save the Raptor" letter. A similar letter was sent by twelve governors—including prominent Democrats like David Paterson of New York and Ted Strickland of Ohio. R. Thomas Buffenbarger, the president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), also weighed in. The governors' letter reads as if it was drafted by Lockheed Martin, which it probably was. "We urge you," it begins, "to sustain 95,000 jobs by certifying continued production of the F-22 Raptor—a defense program that is critical to our defense industrial base." After describing it as "the world's only operationsl 5th Generation fighter" (a popular Lockheed Martin description of the Raptor), the letter returns to the jobs argument asking the President to "carefully consider the economic impact of your decision."

Ah, there it is—their ace in the hole— the jobs argument! How can we cut the bloated military-industrial complex without eliminating jobs and making the unemployment situation even worse? Think of all those college graduates—engineers and the like—who work in the military-industrial complex. Think of all those good middle class jobs! Why Lockheed Martin is doing us all a favor by hiring Americans when every other corporation is outsourcing jobs to China. Lockheed Martin claims that the F-22 program created jobs in forty-four states including 132 lobbying jobs in Washington, DC. But other "job creators" don't have the well-oiled lobbying machine that Lockheed Martin can bring to bear. It has a bevy of ex-Senators and ex-Congressmen in its fold ready to deploy at a moment's notice to all the watering holes in Washington, DC and even to the House steam room to argue with this Senator or that Congressman about the fact that the country needs the F-22 Raptor or whatever other piece of crap weapon Lockheed Martin is selling lest the economic and defense base of the country fall into disrepute and disrepair.

...Lockheed Martin pulled out all the stops, deploying Republican ex-Senator Matt Mattingly of Georgia and former House members like Democrats "Buddy" Darden of Georgia and G. V. "Sonny" Montgomery of Mississippi as paid lobbyists. From a luxury box at a Baltimore Orioles game to the steam room of the House gymnasium—fair game to ex-members like Montgomery and Darden—the urgent message went out that allowing funding to slip for even a few months might strike a devastating blow to our security and our economy. Representative James Moran (D-VA) was taken aback when Sonny Montgomery confronted him in the House steam room: "We sat on the sauna naked together and talked about the F-22.... That's the advantage former members have."

Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff has nothing on these guys. In fact Abramoff is coming forward, now that he's out of jail, and blowing the whistle on how the lobbying industry works. It's job security for ex-Senators and ex-Congressmen and their staffers. The promise of a lucrative job after the member or staffer exits Congress is enough to make the current House and Senate members drool at the possibilities. They can come back to Washington at triple their Congressional salary and use the same House steam room that they used before and sit naked chitchatting with their old buddies ... about the F-22 Raptor among other things. "Hey what did you think about that blonde who waited on us yesterday?"

But Lockheed Martin and their lobbyists never give up. They are a force of nature. Other forms of Federal spending—like education, health care, mass transit and weatherizing buildings—need to be cut so that dollars can be provided for Lockheed Martin and the military-industrial complex. These other prospects for Federal dollars lack the well-oiled lobbying machine of Lockheed Martin.

The F-22's growing cost caused its own concerns. It was so expensive that it threatened to crowd out spending on other combat aircraft. It was a question of blowing billions now on a plane with no clear mission or saving up some money to buy the planes of the future.

Why save up money when you have a cash cow in progress. A cash cow in the hand is worth two in the bush. And then there is the time honored boondoggle of the military-industrial complex—the cost-plus contract. The government pays all costs and then adds a fixed percentage profit over and above that so that Lockheed Martin's CEO and investors do not have to starve. This gives Lockheed Martin every incentive to run up the costs after they low bid and receive the contract. This is called "gold-plating."

At this point the plan was to buy 339 planes for a projected cost of over $62 billion—up from an initial proposal to buy 750 planes for a total price of $25 billion. That's less than half as many planes for well over twice the price. How could this happen? Unfortunately, all too easily. First, Lockheed Martin put in a low bid, knowing full well that the planes would cost far more than its initial estimates. This approach, known in the business as "buying in," allows a company to get the contract first and then jack up the price later. Then the Air Force [their partner in crime] engaged in what is known as "gold plating"—setting new and ever more difficult performance requirements after the plane was already in development. Last but not least, Lockheed Martin simply screwed up certain aspects of the plane's production, even as it gouged the Pentagon on costs for overhead and spare parts. ...this is a time-tested approach that virtually guarantees massive cost overruns.

And those cost overruns lead to higher profits because of the cost-plus contract. The tax paying public is being ripped off by the military-industrial complex to pay for the largest military budget in the world, more than all the rest of the world's military budgets combined. But don't forget about all those well paying middle class jobs it provides. Why the unemployment rate would go up by several points if all of a sudden the Pentagon's budget were to be cut in half back to the level it was when George W Bush came to office in 2000. So the US is stuck in an ever increasing spiral of militarization and mobilization for war simply because it provides so many jobs and such high profits. No rational conversion to a peace time budget could ever take place without a massive transfer by the Federal government of funds spent on war to funds spent on peaceful projects like health, education and welfare. Because the US can spend in an unlimited fashion on war and the preparations for war without any bloviating from the right wing, but as soon as it spends on health, education and welfare—well, that's socialism. The old socialism argument trumps everything, and we're right back to the point that spending on war is the only way to keep unemployment down and to create profits. That's capitalism, don't you know?

August 21, 2011

The Tea Party wants to get "government off 'our' back." But is government really on our back or is the case really that corporations and wealthy interests are on government's back? There are 40,000 or more lobbyists in Washiongton, DC. They are there for the purposes of extracting taxpayer money for their corporate sponsors' benefits and for no other reason. The notion that taxpayer money goes to provide benefits for taxpayers, especially middle class taxpayers, is rather nieve. Taxpayer money goes to provide benefits for large corporations and the wealthy because the poor can't afford lobbyists. And the union movement is practically dead so union money is not influencing legislators to any great extent. Republican Governors like Scott Walker are doing their level best to kill off the remaining unions so that corporate sponsored lobbyists will have full sway in Washington. They aren't there to help the middle class; that's for sure. They are there to write legislation favorable to their own interests whether they be defense contractors lobbying for more money for military hardware or corporate flacks trying to drill holes in the tax code or lower the corporate tax rate. The notion that a lower corporate tax rate combined with closing the loopholes is preferable is nieve since lobbyists will only then proceed to drill new loopholes into the tax code at the lower rate.

Republicans argue that any expiration of a "temporary" tax cut such as the Bush tax cuts is actually a tax increase, but Michelle Bachman said on Meet the Press that she wouldn't be in favor of extending the "temporary" reduction in the payroll tax rate because "we can't afford it." Yet we can afford, according to her, to continue the temporary Bush tax cuts which amount to a whole hellava lot more. Why won't Bachman apply the same logic to the temporary payroll tax cuts? I'll tell you why. Because the payroll tax affects mainly the poor and middle class. It's a regressive tax that's used to pay social security recipients and for many years the excess was just combined with income tax revenues and spent in the General Fund. So General Fund expenditures were partially funded by a regressive tax on the poor. Right wingers love to point out that the poor and lower middle class pay hardly any income tax. What they don't point out is that they pay excessive payroll taxes, taxes that allow for no deductions or exemptions. For instance, if you're a poor self-employed worker earning $10,000 a year, you will pay over $1500. in payroll taxes no matter how many children you have or how many medical expenses or anything else. You will pay at a tax rate of 15.3% (except for this year for which there is a 2% reduction for employees), more than a hedge fund manager pays. Capital gains are taxed at only 15%. Is that fair? Of course not. As long as the money is being spent in the General Fund and treated as income tax revenue, deductions and exemptions should be allowed for payroll taxes which affect mainly the poor just as they are for income taxes which affect mainly the rich. When right wingers point out that the poor don't pay any income tax, they fail to point out that the poor, especially the poor self-employed, pay a higher rate, when you consider payroll taxes, than rich hedge fund managers including Warren Buffet. Please note that the rich pay hardly any payroll taxes and have voluminous deductions and exemptions on their income taxes.

So instead of getting government off our back which is the movie right wingers want you to see, instead we should be trying to get corporations off government's back, which is the reality they want you to ignore, so that government can better serve the interests and needs of the poor and middle class. The right wing makes no bones about this being class warfare. They flat out come out and say that they are in power for one reason and one reason only: to serve the needs of the rich corporate class. That is their purpose in life. They don't even try to hide it. Michelle Bachman is not in favor of extending unemployment benefits for the long term unemployed because "we simply can't afford it." Yeah, but we can still afford more tax breaks for the rich because they are the "job creators." Really? REALLY?? If they are the job creators, then where are the friggin jobs? They've had 30 years of supply side economics (or voodoo economics as the first George Bush christened it) and the job situation is worse than it was in the Great Depression in absolute numbers of people out of work and on the verge of desperation. We "can't afford" to allow them to subsist which would cost a paltry amount, but we can afford to give gargantuan tax breaks to the corporate class because - hint, hint - they might create a job or two somewhere down the line. Give me a break. The only jobs they are creating are overseas. Cheap labor combined with automation produces all the goods and most of the services that the US needs. Free trade has allowed the global labor force to be concentrated in the country where labor is cheapest and the finished product shipped to wherever it can be sold. Increasingly, this is not in the US where consumers have cut back on their spending finally realizing that their houses can no longer be used as ATMs.

We don't need small government, weak government, a government that corporate lobbyists can ride roughshod over; we need smart government, strong government, "right sized" government, a government which has the audacity to kick lobbyists out of Washington and get money out of politics. Most Republican Senators and Congressmen are merely front men for corporations. They are merely "political personalities" able to garner votes and get themselves elected. They are not legislators. Lobbyists write the laws. As front men for corporations, Republican Congressmen's paychecks are provided by the corporations they represent. They need big money to get elected. When their time in Congress is finished, they can look forward to a cushy job working for the corporations they represent and making use of their inside contacts in Washington to funnel more taxpayer money and taxpayer funded contracts to the corporations they first represented and later worked for. Small government simply means government dominated by large corporations which exists to extract taxpayer money, mainly from the poor and middle class, and transfer it to the wealthy in terms of tax breaks and government contracts. It's not the poor who are feeding off the government trough; it's the rich. They want you to watch this movie over here about welfare queens and ignore that reality over there about the transfer of wealth to the already wealthy. They want you to abhor the redistribution of wealth from the government to the poor and middle class in terms of entitlements and unemployment insurance while ignoring the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich.

And why should unelected political underworld figures like Grover Norquist be in the position of extracting a pledge from every elected Republican Congressman that they won't raise taxes? They were elected to do the public's bidding not Grover Norquist's. Unelected rogues like Karl Rove, Dick Army, the Koch brothers and Grover Norquist are trying to control the American political system just as unelected lobbyists swarm the Capitol. And as for getting money out of politics, who benefits the most from keeping money in politics? The TV and cable channels who receive huge sums of money in the form of political TV ads. That's where most of the money is spent. Consequently, you will never hear anything about getting money out of politics on Meet the Press, Face the Nation or on any cable news infotainment show. There are vested interests which want to keep money in politics, the more the better. The Citizens United Supreme Court decision was a windfall for media news channels. No wonder they give as much air as possible to charlatins like Sarah Palin and Christene O'Donnell; their paychecks could just as well be endorsed by big right wing money. Instead of getting people on their shows who are really intelligent and insightful, they get airheads and then look forward to another infusion of right wing cash. The exception is CNN's Fareed Zakaria who always books intelligent and articulate experts.

Getting government off corporations' backs implies a rational world in which corporations want nothing more than to compete freely in the free enterprise system without being interfered with by government. They just want to go merrily along competing with their competitors, providing jobs, serving the public interest and providing value to their shareholders. In reality this hands off approach is a total lie. Corporations are totally hands on when it comes to government. They spend big bucks on lobbyists to make sure that government cash and legislation is funneled their way. They are not simply competing with other corporations in the free marketplace. They are using government to their advantage, and they are making sure that the middle class does not get to use government to its advantage. They don't simply want to get government off their backs. They want to climb on the back of government. They want to make sure that government does not tell them what to do, whether or not they can destroy the environment or cheat consumers. They want to tell government what it can do which is to say remove any regulations which might protect the public or the environment and lower their profit margins. They want to get government out of their way so they can exploit foreign labor and American consumers because this will maximize their profits, and that, my friend, is their bottom line. They are here to serve themselves not the public and they will use every lever of government in order to do so.

August 02, 2011

With all eyes in Washington focused on the debt ceiling debate, little has been made of another costly impasse. Republicans have refused to re-authorize the Federal Aviation Administration without including an anti-union measure in the deal, leaving the FAA in the midst of a costly 10-day shutdown that has forced it to furlough more than 4,000 workers nationwide.

Now, with Congressional leaders seemingly close to ending their fight over the debt ceiling, House Minority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced today that the House will begin its August recess after it votes on the debt deal later today. That means the FAA shutdown, which began July 22, will likely last at least another month.

Democrats on the House Transportation Committee are outraged, as Reps. Nick Rahall (D-WV) and Jerry Costello (D-IL) called the recess “irresponsible” and said they planned to write a letter to Cantor calling on him to keep the House in session until the FAA was re-authorized.

Meanwhile, the FAA’s airport inspectors keep doing their jobs, even without pay:

The administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration says airport safety inspectors nationwide are working without pay and shouldering travel expenses themselves, as the agency’s budget crisis enters a second week. [...]

An inspector may travel to five airports in a two-week period, racking up thousands of dollars in hotel and airline tickets. Babbitt says they’re being asked to put those expenses on personal credit cards.

The government is losing more than $200 million a week in revenue generated through ticket taxes during the shutdown, and $2.5 billion in airport infrastructure improvement projects are on hold. The airlines, meanwhile, have used those tax breaks to line their own pockets rather than pass the savings on to customers.The Senate is reportedly staying in session to work on a re-authorization plan.

August 01, 2011

A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.

For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.

Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond.

The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.

Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.

And then there are the reported terms of the deal, which amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president. First, there will be big spending cuts, with no increase in revenue. Then a panel will make recommendations for further deficit reduction — and if these recommendations aren’t accepted, there will be more spending cuts.

Republicans will supposedly have an incentive to make concessions the next time around, because defense spending will be among the areas cut. But the G.O.P. has just demonstrated its willingness to risk financial collapse unless it gets everything its most extreme members want. Why expect it to be more reasonable in the next round?

In fact, Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats. He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.

Did the president have any alternative this time around? Yes.

First of all, he could and should have demanded an increase in the debt ceiling back in December. When asked why he didn’t, he replied that he was sure that Republicans would act responsibly. Great call.

And even now, the Obama administration could have resorted to legal maneuvering to sidestep the debt ceiling, using any of several options. In ordinary circumstances, this might have been an extreme step. But faced with the reality of what is happening, namely raw extortion on the part of a party that, after all, only controls one house of Congress, it would have been totally justifiable.

At the very least, Mr. Obama could have used the possibility of a legal end run to strengthen his bargaining position. Instead, however, he ruled all such options out from the beginning.

But wouldn’t taking a tough stance have worried markets? Probably not. In fact, if I were an investor I would be reassured, not dismayed, by a demonstration that the president is willing and able to stand up to blackmail on the part of right-wing extremists. Instead, he has chosen to demonstrate the opposite.

Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.

It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.

In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.

As the broad strokes of the debt ceiling deal began to leak out over the weekend, progressive groups filled reporters’ inboxes with outraged e-mails. “Seeing a Democratic President take taxing the rich off the table and instead push a deal that will lead to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefit cuts is like entering a bizarre parallel universe — one with horrific consequences for middle-class families,” Progressive Change Campaign Committee Co-Founder Stephanie Taylor wrote. “This deal is the exact opposite of what the majority of Americans support, and all Democrats in Congress should oppose it.”

“MoveOn’s 5 million members, along with the vast majority of Americans, will not stand for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefit cuts–not now, and not six months from now,” wrote Justin Ruben, Executive Director of MoveOn.org, “Congress should reject both ‘triggers’, and a ‘Super Congress’, and pass a clean debt ceiling bill that doesn’t force the middle class and the poor to bear the brunt of this crisis.”

But as the details of the compromise emerged, it seemed there was actually a lot for liberals to like about this bill. If and when the House passes the bill on Monday, it will likely be with the help of a lot of Democrats. Here’s why some liberals are actually happy with this deal:

The 2012 budget: At one point in the negotiations, the 2012 budget was to be slashed by $36 billion. The final number of cuts: just $7 billion. And just to ensure we don’t have another bruising government shutdown fight over cuts in September, the deal deems and passes the 2012 budget. Yes, that’s right, the old Gephardt Rule or Slaughter Solution, is back. What’s deem and pass? It’s a legislative trick that essentially means that Congress will consider the budget passed without ever actually having to vote on it.

The trigger: This is counterintuitive, but the trigger is actually pretty good for Democrats. For all that MoveOn thinks that it would force benefit cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, it actually wouldn’t trigger benefit cuts to any entitlements. The only cuts it would force would be a 2% or more haircut for Medicare providers. And House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, along with most Democrats, has never opposed provider cuts. Not only that, most progressives actually want the Pentagon cuts. So if the committee deadlocks and the trigger is pulled, Democrats won’t be miserable.

The commission: Again, for all the liberal carping about a “Super Congress,” the commission of 12 members — three from each party in each chamber — set up to find the second phase of $1.5 trillion in cuts by Thanksgiving is actually rigged to force some revenue increases. Yes, the Bush tax cuts are off the table. But there are plenty of loopholes, subsidies and other corporate welfare programs that are on the table. And with such a strong trigger, it’s hard to imagine at least one Republican not voting to kill corporate jet subsidies over slashing $500 billion from the defense budget – even if the revenues aren’t offset. The question is: who are Republicans more afraid of, Grover Norquist or the joint chiefs? Democrats’ money is on the joint chiefs.

The immediate cuts: It may seem like a lot, but the $917 billion in the first phase of cuts were carefully negotiated by Vice President Joe Biden and his group. They include $350 billion in Pentagon cuts – a win for liberals. They don’t touch entitlement benefits, another win. And they set top line numbers for the next decade of budgets that aren’t draconian. It still cuts where liberals might prefer to spend, but most of the savings are backloaded to avoid extreme austerity in next few years of fragile economic recovery. Just $7 billion would be cut in 2012, and only $3 billion in 2013. And of that combined $10 billion, half would come from the Pentagon. On top of that, the discretionary spending caps on budgets in future Congresses are subject to revision by those bodies.

The debt ceiling: Raising the debt ceiling through 2013 will not be contingent on the second round of cuts. There will merely be a vote of disapproval. This avoids another messy fight in January and another round of painful forced cuts.

In a world where the Tea Party didn’t exist, would this be a good bill for Democrats? Absolutely not. But considering that the trigger, commission, two-step process and discretionary budget cuts could’ve been a LOT worse – and actually were in Boehner’s version of the bill – this deal will be easier to swallow. The commission will likely mean a long-term win for Democrats: they’ll get either their revenue increases or achieve significant Pentagon cuts. It could mark a political victory as well: If Pelosi passes this bill on primarily Democratic support, they’ll look like the adults in the room who can compromise and govern, a stark contrast to the Tea Party freshmen.

Anyone who characterizes the deal between the President, Democratic, and Republican leaders as a victory for the American people over partisanship understands neither economics nor politics.

The deal does not raise taxes on America’s wealthy and most fortunate — who are now taking home a larger share of total income and wealth, and whose tax rates are already lower than they have been, in eighty years. Yet it puts the nation’s most important safety nets and public investments on the chopping block.

It also hobbles the capacity of the government to respond to the jobs and growth crisis. Added to the cuts already underway by state and local governments, the deal’s spending cuts increase the odds of a double-dip recession. And the deal strengthens the political hand of the radical right.

Yes, the deal is preferable to the unfolding economic catastrophe of a default on the debt of the U.S. government. The outrage and the shame is it has come to this choice.

More than a year ago, the President could have conditioned his agreement to extend the Bush tax cuts beyond 2010 on Republicans’ agreement not to link a vote on the debt ceiling to the budget deficit. But he did not.

Many months ago, when Republicans first demanded spending cuts and no tax increases as a condition for raising the debt ceiling, the President could have blown their cover. He could have shown the American people why this demand had nothing to do with deficit reduction but everything to do with the GOP’s ideological fixation on shrinking the size of the government — thereby imperiling Medicare, Social Security, education, infrastructure, and everything else Americans depend on. But he did not.

And through it all the President could have explained to Americans that the biggest economic challenge we face is restoring jobs and wages and economic growth, that spending cuts in the next few years will slow the economy even further, and therefore that the Republicans’ demands threaten us all. Again, he did not.

The radical right has now won a huge tactical and strategic victory. Democrats and the White House have proven they have little by way of tactics or strategy.

By putting Medicare and Social Security on the block, they have made it more difficult for Democrats in the upcoming 2012 election cycle to blame Republicans for doing so.

By embracing deficit reduction as their apparent goal – claiming only that they’d seek to do it differently than the GOP – Democrats and the White House now seemingly agree with the GOP that the budget deficit is the biggest obstacle to the nation’s future prosperity.

The budget deficit is not the biggest obstacle to our prosperity. Lack of jobs and growth is. And the largest threat to our democracy is the emergence of a radical right capable of getting most of the ransom it demands.

March 14, 2011

With the stroke of a pen Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin ended collective bargaining rights for workers in Wisconsin. How is it possible that 50 years worth of hard fought for rights can be ended with the stroke of a pen? Well, the Republicans control both houses of the bicameral legislature and the Governorship in Wisconsin. They can do whatever they want. If tomorrow they wanted to sell off state owned assets to their cronies, they could do it. In fact that's already in the budget bill that they're getting ready to pass next. The only reason that any of this has even come to national attention is that the 14 Democratic Senators, one of whose prescence was required to establish a quorum, left the state so that the original budget bill couldn't be passed. Now that they're back, Republicans have their quorum and can proceed to pass whatever they want. If tomorrow they want to pass a bill declaring that the moon is made of green Wisconsin cheese, they can do it.

These same battles are being fought out in every state in which Republicans have control of the political structure - namely, Ohio, Michigan, Florida and New Jersey among others. Voters, are you happy now? Governor Walker's bill also gives power over the state's Medicaid system known as BadgerCare to a political appointee taking it away from the legislature where it currently resides. Poor people kiss your health care good-bye in the state of Wisconsin. Other states will seek to follow suit. A little talked about provision of Walker's bill is that it would cut off $834 million in funding to the public school system. This would effectively cripple public schools already underfunded and double class sizes. Voters, are you happy now? But wait there's more.

The Walker Budget bill expands the school voucher program to rich kids who want to attend private school and have the state government pay for part of their tuition. The voucher program was a poison pill started ostensibly to help poor black kids get a better education. But Walker's bill would let anyone regardless of income get a government voucher for private school tuition at the same time he is defunding the public school system. This is from the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel:

Voucher advocates have made clear for more than 20 years that their goal is to replace public education with a system of universal vouchers that includes private and religious schools.

The heartbreaking drama currently playing in Milwaukee - millions of dollars cut from the public schools while vouchers are expanded so wealthy families can attend private schools in the suburbs - may be coming soon to a school district near you.

...

The voucher program started in 1990, billed as an altruistic effort to help a few struggling community schools serving mostly poor black kids. There were only seven schools and 300 students, with the program costing $700,000. To most legislators, it seemed a worthwhile effort, sort of like throwing a few dollars in the church missionary basket.

Even then, however, backers, such as Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation, envisioned a full-scale voucher program. Michael Joyce, the late head of the foundation, made no secret of his belief that public schools were akin to socialism. Vouchers were his free-market alternative.

Bit by bit, budget by budget - as part of a long-term strategy - the program grew. The expansions always were couched in fine-sounding rhetoric that cloaked the program's harm to public education.

This year, taxpayers are paying $131 million for the private school tuition of 21,000 students - making vouchers, in essence, one of the state's largest school districts, on par with Madison, Racine, Kenosha and Green Bay. With the expansion, vouchers will become the state's second-largest district, just behind Milwaukee.

All along, hard-core voucher proponents were using poor black kids as pawns in their voucher chess game. More than a decade ago, a strategy paper for the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation likened vouchers for low-income children to a "viable beachhead," a way "to win and hold new ground in the long march to universal school choice."

Today, in Milwaukee, that long march is just about over. Vouchers are to be open, eventually, to any Milwaukee family, no matter how rich, to attend a private school anywhere in the county. The children of Milwaukee millionaires could conceivably receive $6,442 next year to help pay the $20,423 high school tuition at the private University School.

The Walker budget goes out of its way to help voucher schools and harm Milwaukee Public Schools. While voucher funding will increase, with no limit on how much, MPS faces untold millions in budget cuts. Some of those cuts are directly due to vouchers, which reduce the amount of state aid MPS otherwise would receive.

Milwaukee taxpayers, meanwhile, are forced to pick up the tab for more than a third of the voucher bill; already they pay $50 million a year.

Overall, Walker is cutting $834 million in public education - eliminating state funding for school nurses, Advanced Placement courses, alternative education and children at-risk programs. There are also significant cuts in programs such as the school breakfast program, Head Start and bilingual aid. Funding for special education and other essential programs is flat, with no additional money even if need increases.

...

Taken as a whole, the Walker budget is a blueprint for expanding private schools and destroying public schools. And there's nothing to stop this tragedy from spreading to the entire state.

Unless, of course, legislators do the right thing and protect the American dream of a free and public education for all children.

So in addition to busting unions and privatizing the state's power plants, Walker's stealth plan includes defunding public schools and using the state's supposedly limited resources to fund an unlimited voucher program that pays part of a wealthy kid's tuition at a private school. Of course, poor kids will hardly be able to take advantage of Walker's Brave New World voucher program as they won't be able to afford the rest of the tuition. They will have served their purpose as "beachhead establishers." Again government taxpayer funds are used to help the wealthy at a time in which there is supposedly a budget crisis. But wait there's more. Walker's ginned up, phony "financial crisis" was brought on in the first place by his having given $140 million in tax cuts to corporations just after taking office. Then like Chicken Little he rushed out to announce that there was a $137 million budget deficit and draconian measures including busting unions, privatizing power plants and the public school system, screwing with BadgerCare and making elected state officeholders political appointees would of necessity have to be taken. Er, Walker you could rescind those tax breaks to your cronies... Just a thought.

Well, what does all this have to do with my main theme that Walker's power play of union busting and privatizing will look like child's play compared to what will happen on a national scale after Republicans win big in 2012? Simply this: if with a stroke of a pen Walker could reverse 50 years of progress in workers' rights, with the stroke of a pen the new Republican President backed by a Republican House and Senate (not to mention a Republican Supreme Court) can with a stroke of a pen put an end to Social Security and Medicare. The precedent has already been established that, despite a worker's having paid into social security over a lifetime, he or she has no constitutionally protected right to any of that money. Congress has the right to change the laws governing Social Security and Medicare at any time that they so choose.

"The fact that workers contribute to the Social Security program's funding through a dedicated payroll tax establishes a unique connection between those tax payments and future benefits. More so than general federal income taxes can be said to establish 'rights' to certain government services. This is often expressed in the idea that Social Security benefits are 'an earned right.' This is true enough in a moral and political sense. But like all federal entitlement programs, Congress can change the rules regarding eligibility--and it has done so many times over the years. The rules can be made more generous, or they can be made more restrictive. Benefits which are granted at one time can be withdrawn, as for example with student benefits, which were substantially scaled-back in the 1983 Amendments.

"There has been a temptation throughout the program's history for some people to suppose that their FICA payroll taxes entitle them to a benefit in a legal, contractual sense. That is to say, if a person makes FICA contributions over a number of years, Congress cannot, according to this reasoning, change the rules in such a way that deprives a contributor of a promised future benefit. Under this reasoning, benefits under Social Security could probably only be increased, never decreased, if the Act could be amended at all. Congress clearly had no such limitation in mind when crafting the law. Section 1104 of the 1935 Act, entitled 'RESERVATION OF POWER,' specifically said: 'The right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision of this Act is hereby reserved to the Congress.' Even so, some have thought that this reservation was in some way unconstitutional. This is the issue finally settled by Flemming v. Nestor.

"In this 1960 Supreme Court decision Nestor's denial of benefits was upheld even though he had contributed to the program for 19 years and was already receiving benefits. Under a 1954 law, Social Security benefits were denied to persons deported for, among other things, having been a member of the Communist party. Accordingly, Mr. Nestor's benefits were terminated. He appealed the termination arguing, among other claims, that promised Social Security benefits were a contract and that Congress could not renege on that contract. In its ruling, the Court rejected this argument and established the principle that entitlement to Social Security benefits is not contractual right."

So these rights could go out the window with a stroke of a pen regardless of whether or not it had even been an issue in the campaign. And, although it is unthinkable to the average middle class American, Social Security benefits could be abruptly ended for everyone including current recipients with the stroke of a pen. It's not unthinkable, and the thinkable is definitely possible. Did Scott Walker make union busting a campaign issue? Of course not. The plan was to bust the unions, privatize the power plants and school system on a stealth basis before anyone knew what hit them. Thanks to the 14 Democratic Senators who absconded from Wisconsin, it didn't quite turn out that way. But that will not prevent Republicans from abolishing Social Security and Medicare when they gain control over the national governmental apparatus in 2012.

So voters and Tea Partiers, I ask again will you be happy then? After you have given total control of the US government to Republicans and they have ruined the public education system, privatized everything they can get their hands on and ended Social Security and Medicare? Of course they will be happy because Rush Limpballs, Glenn Beck, Fox News and assorted hate mongers will tell them that they have practically entered the Promised Land of Low Taxes and Small Government (except for the military-industrial complex). The billionaire Koch brothers will use their billions to run ads convincing voters of how happy they will be if only they will elect a Republican President in 2012 along with Republican majorities in the House and Senate. And like lemmings, Tea Partiers will follow them off the cliff. And all those mooches on taxpayer's money - the welfare queens, seniors and poor people - forget them. They are losers who should go out and get a job.

January 20, 2011

It is well known that members of Congress have the best of gold plated health care policies bought and paid for by you, the American taxpayer. We're paying for the privilege of having the GOP controlled House piss around with repealing health care for the people that pay for theirs. How arrogant of them! Please get this government burden off our backs - the burden of paying for health care for the politicians who are trying to repeal our health care. If they were'nt such hypocrites, they would repeal their government provided health care first. I'm sick and tired of paying for health care for politicians who want to deny the American public protection from having their policies terminated if they should have the audacity to get sick.

The following is from an article subtitled, "Politicians Receive the Country's Best Care - at Taxpayer Expense."

Few would deny that a health care crisis looms large in the U.S. In a country with millions of uninsured and underinsured citizens, health care has become more a privilege than a right. Indeed, the United States remains the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t guarantee health care to all its citizens.

But this isn’t the case for members of the U.S. Congress. Representatives and Senators alike receive some of the best health care benefits in the country, much of it paid for with taxpayer dollars. Yet these same members seem unable - or unwilling - to extend similar protections to the rest of America.

Federal Employees Health Benefits Program

As soon as members of Congress are sworn in, they may participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). The program offers an assortment of health plans from which to choose, including fee-for-service, point-of-service, and health maintenance organizations (HMOs). In addition, Congress members can also insure their spouses and their dependents.

Not only does Congress get to choose from a wide range of plans, but there’s no waiting period. Unlike many Americans who must struggle against precondition clauses or are even denied coverage because of those preconditions, Senators and Representatives are covered no matter what - effective immediately.

And here’s the best part. The government pays up to 75 percent of the premium. That government, of course, is funded by taxpayers, the same taxpayers who often cannot afford health care themselves.

More Health Care Perks for Congress

And the Congressional perks don’t stop with the FEHBP. According to the article “Health care as good as Congress gets,” by John Barry, a staff writer for the St. Petersburg Times, “Members of Congress have their own pharmacy, right in the Capitol. They also have a team of doctors, technicians and nurses standing by in case something busts in a filibuster. They can get a physical exam, an X-ray or an electrocardiogram, without leaving work.”

The GOP Yahoos in addition to receiving their government subsidized health care are wasting taxpayer money by voting to repeal Obamacare. They know they can't really do it because the Democrats control the Senate so it won't pass muster with the Senate. Yet the GOP controlled House is wasting time and taxpayer money making a big deal over repealing it instead of spending their time getting some work done which might actually benefit the American people. They're the ones who always talk as if they are doing what the "American people" want when in reality they are doing the bidding of the corporations - in this case the health insurance corporations. They are nothing more than corporate shills, yet they are always talking about the American people. Well, what this American person wants is for them to repeal their own taxpayer funded, gold plated health care. If it's good enough for the gander, it's good enough for the goose. Then let them buy insurance on the private market. If they happen to get sick, tough. They will be kicked off their policy; their medical bills will mount up. Why they just might lose their home and have to declare bankruptcy. If it's good enough for the American people, it's good enough for them.

I'm for making government smaller by eliminating government subsidized health care for members of Congress. With the money saved we can properly fund Medicaid. These Congressmen are mostly millionaires anyway. Surely, they can afford to buy health insurance on the private market. But they are such hypocrites. They want to deny any kind of government aid to poor people while they appropriate as many government resources as they possibly can for themselves and their cronies. And I am talking here mainly about Republicans. The Democrats for the most part are responsible for passing Obamacare which will provide protections for the American people like preventing health insurance companies from discriminating against them based on preexisting conditions. So this is not a rant against "government"; it's a rant against Republican controlled government which is wholly subservient to corporate lobbyists.

I'm happy to see that the House GOP's big publicity stunt - the repeal of Obamacare - is going nowhere as Democrats point out all the good things in Obamacare like ending the doughnut hole for seniors, ending policy termination due to preexisting conditions, ending rescission which is when you get kicked off your policy after you get sick, letting young adults remain on their parents' policies until they're 26 etc. More and more people are starting to realize and appreciate the profound benefits of Obamacare, and President Obama's approval rating is getting steadily higher with each passing day.

Not so the hapless Republicans who don't have a plan for replacing Obamacare. Now if they just would have said "let's make Obamacare better" instead of trashing it lock, stock and barrel. Wouldn't that have been the sensible thing to do? Let's make it better. Admittedly, it's not perfect. More cost containment is needed. If the Republicans were sincere and serious, they would have taken that attitude: let's make the weak parts of it stronger. The Democrats would have gladly partnered with them in a cooperative effort. Oh wait - the reason it's not better is that Republicans did everything they possibly could to weaken it in the first place. Their approach is wholly destructive when, if they truly cared about the American people - and not the corporations that provide campaign funds for the politicians - they woud have taken a more constructive approach in the first place.

December 04, 2010

Even as Congress debates whether to extend emergency unemployment checks for more than 6 million Americans who are approaching the 99-week limit, some four million others are facing the certain end of their benefits over the next year, unless an entirely new program is crafted.

This is the sobering conclusion of a report released by the President's Council of Economic Advisers on Thursday. The study forecast that the exhaustion of unemployment benefits for so many will curb spending power enough to significantly impede an already weak economic recovery.

The typical household now receiving emergency unemployment benefits would see their income fall by a third should they lose their checks, according to the report. Among the roughly 40 percent of households in which the person receiving a check is the sole breadwinner, income would fall by 90 percent.

The existing emergency unemployment program, which extends benefits for nearly two years, expired on Wednesday. Without an agreement to extend the program, the economy will lose about 600,000 jobs, as the spending enabled by continued unemployment checks ceases. National economic output--which expanded at an annual pace of 2.5 percent during the summer months--would fall off by 0.6 percent.

That disturbing prospect does not even account for the roughly four million people who would exceed even the extended limits in the emergency program. Were that many jobless people left to fend themselves without unemployment checks, that would pose significant risks for the broader economy, say economists. They cite the fact that consumer spending accounts for roughly 70 percent of all economic activity.

"If you're looking for economic recovery supported by consumers, it's discouraging," said Henry J. Aaron, an economist at the Brookings Institution, a research institution in Washington. "It's drag on the economy."

Many economists argue that paying unemployment benefits is among the most effective ways the government can spur the economy: Jobless people tend to spend nearly all of their unemployment checks, distributing those dollars throughout the economy.